Maand: mei 2016

It’s easy for people to underestimate the effect that environmental conditions have on a nation’s economic development. In the case of India, these environmental conditions prohibit the nation from ever experiencing the type of economic boom we have seen in nations like China and South Korea.

There is no reason whatsoever for us to assume that a pattern that played out in currently industrialized nations will per definition repeat itself in other nations. Many nations are likely never to experience the type of carbon intensive lifestyle currently seen in the developed world.

The argument frequently heard from right-wing politicians in the US and Europe, that it doesn’t matter what they do to address global warming because India and China are just going to continue spewing out carbon dioxide miss an important point: India is never going to industrialize. How much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere will ultimately come to depend mostly on the decisions made in countries that are currently developed.

Some of the problems India is bound to run into that will inevitably prohibit it from industrializing are as following:

Peak coal

India simply doesn’t have the big coal reserves that other nations do. Coal India Limited is a state owned corporation responsible for 80% of India’s coal production. Based on its current estimated coal reserves, the growth rate the company aims for means that it would exhaust its reserves in 14 years, as of this moment.

Note that currently estimated reserves don’t consider the problem that not all reserves can be accessed. India has lignite reserves, located in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. Lignite can’t be transported far from the place where it’s mined, due to its low energy content. Other reserves are located beneath valuable farmland and densely populated areas. Keep in mind that the entire nation of India has a population density roughly as high as the Netherlands, universally understood to be an overpopulated nation.

Ozone pollution

India’s crop yield is decimated by ozone pollution from cars and industrial processes. It’s estimated that ozone pollution as of 2014 caused India to lose 9.2% of its yield every year. Most ground-level ozone pollution can be traced back to vehicle transport. India in 2011 had 13 cars per 1000 people, compared to the 500-800 per 1000 range that’s typical of industrialized nations.

Ozone formation is a strongly temperature dependent process, that rises non-linearly as temperatures increase. This is why the impact of ozone pollution in India on crop yields is so much higher than in other nations. As temperatures in India continue to rise, ozone pollution is set to grow much worse.

As a result of climate change, India is expected to see a strong rise in stagnant air days by up to forty per year, which ensure that the pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion isn’t blown out over the ocean. As a consequence, Indian citizens will suffer the health effects and Indian crops will suffer reduced yields. To have as many cars driving around in India as in Europe and North America would be a very bad idea.

Thermal pollution and water shortages

To exploit coal and natural gas requires the use of water to drive steam turbines. In most Western nations, water shortages are not a big issue. In India however, water is scarce and is about to become even more scarce. India has some of the world’s most rapidly depleted aquifers. The Indus river mostly depends on meltwater from the Himalaya.

If India can not find the cool fresh water it needs to drive its steam turbines, the rapid rise in coal and natural gas use will prove to be unsustainable. As a consequence, electricity use would have to be rationed. The country’s thermal power plants already draw in over half of the country’s total water use. A water shortage will thus inevitably also mean an energy shortage.

The bottom line

The IEA thinks China’s coal use has permanently peaked in 2013, while its carbon emissions peaked in 2014. Europe’s emissions have also peaked years ago and are now rapidly declining. If India’s industrial development is inevitably constrained by its own situation, the outcome of this crisis will largely depend on nations like the United States. Dodging responsibility by pointing to China and India is not a viable argument, as decisive action in the United states could strongly reduce the total cumulative emissions our world will witness.

Most efforts to address climate change so far have aimed to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. Unfortunately, these efforts haven’t had the effect that people had hoped for. Emissions appear unlikely to decline anytime soon, due to the rapid economic growth of developing countries. Carbon capture and sequestration turned out to be more difficult than people had assumed, as most of these experiments have been cancelled.

It would have been possible decades ago to come to an agreement on the need to end economic growth and reduce our overall energy use and material consumption. As Tim Jackson has shown, nine billion people by 2050 with the standard of living currently enjoyed in the EU would have to emit CO2 at less than 2% per dollar of GDP of our current level, something that seems very implausible.

The focus thus began to lie on looking for new technologies, that would allow us to continue to pursue growth without suffering the consequences of climate change. As John Michael Greer has pointed out however, there is no rational reason whatsoever to assume that there has to be some source of energy out there that will have all the same advantages as fossil fuels, but without the catastrophic effects on our biosphere.

To assume that we can simply move on to another source of energy without suffering any disruption to our standard of living reveals an anthropocentric cognitive bias. As we have found out in the years behind us, there are limits to the degree of power that technology can give us over our natural environment. The power technology has granted us has also led us to develop a blind spot in our recognition of the degree to which we are dependent on the functioning of our ecosystems.

Of course, when we discover that we fail to reduce our fossil fuel use, there are also other options available to us. The other side of the equation, carbon sequestration by the biosphere, is not fixed in place but dependent on a variety of factors that include human land use.

One option available to us is known as oceanic iron fertilization. In large parts of the ocean, iron is thought to be the limiting element in carbon sequestration by algae. Under iron deficient conditions, every atom of iron can be used by algae to sequester 106,000 atoms of carbon. As a consequence, iron fertilization theoretically allows us to sequester a lot of carbon dioxide, at very low costs. In practice results have been somewhat disappointing however. Sequestering 1000 ton of carbon requires a single ton of iron.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical and worried about the potential impact that such interventions can have. We are after all intervening in a complex system, which have a tendency to react in ways that are difficult to anticipate in advance. Even experiments done on a limited scale may not adequately translate into the large scale projects that would help us to cope with climate change.

Fortunately, we can observe what happens when oceanic iron fertilization occurs through natural processes. Volcanic eruptions fertilize the ocean with iron from their dust at a very large scale, at seemingly random intervals. The ecological harm done by such fertilization seems to be very limited.

The argument, that iron fertilization represents an intervention in the ecosystem, can also be turned around, to argue instead that iron fertilization fills a hole in the ecosystem, left by human activity. The rate at which carbon dioxide enters our atmosphere is extremely rapid, we know of no geological analogue. As a consequence, certain slow negative feedback processes take a long time to become relevant and prevent escalating temperatures.

As an example, a gradual increase in temperatures is normally associated with an increase in icebergs that travel across the ocean and deposit nutrients in the ocean, including iron. This process is thought to sequester a significant share of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Because our carbon emissions are now so abnormally rapid, oceanic iron fertilization could be interpreted as an attempt to substitute for the natural negative feedback that takes time to emerge, until it has time to kick in.

In addition, there is another problem that humans have caused, in which oceanic iron fertilization can play an important role. The decline in whales has likely led to a decline in algae. The whales defecate and dive to deep depths, continually circling iron throughout the ocean, sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide in the process and helping to keep the oceans they inhabit full of life. The decimation of whales in recent centuries has reduced the cycling of iron.

For humans to add iron to the oceans could thus be seen as performing a compensatory role that whales can not currently adequately perform due to their low numbers. An increase in algae due to iron fertilization may have the effect of increasing whale numbers. For this reason, studies that find that the sequester carbon dioxide does not sink to the bottom of the ocean, are not per definition failure, if it means that the nutrients continue to be recycled throughout the food chain.

Estimates of the role that iron fertilization can play reveal a limited impact. One estimate, where iron limitations in the ocean are eliminted globally, calculates that 33 parts per million could be shaved off our atmospheric CO2 levels by 2100. This however, is an underestimate of the full impact that fertilization can have.

Life creates the conditions that allow more life to come into existence, algae are perhaps a prime example of this rule. Algae blooms are brightly colored, increasing the planet’s albedo. An example of such an algae bloom is shown below:

This example in particular is a coccolithophore bloom, which are becoming increasingly common due to our changing climate. The bright color increases the planet’s albedo, thus reducing global temperatures by reflecting more sunlight. In addition to this, algae produce large amounts of dimethylsulfide, which increases the generation of clouds, reflecting more sunlight and further aiding in the stabilization of global temperatures. The total potential effect on global temperatures is thus likely to be much larger than hitherto estimated based on sequestered carbon dioxide alone.

It seems to me that the top priority for environmentalists should currently be to preserve a habitable Earth for as many species as possible. Oceanic iron fertilization can play a role in this, as it fills a gap created by human interventions in natural processes. It does not have the potential to avert a catastrophe on its own, but it should not be dismissed as part of a broader plan when combined with other options that will hopefully allow us to avoid a global catastrophe as our fossil fuel use continues unabated.